After 35, Muscle Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Build

By Tina Chagoury, Clinical Dietitian · 5 min read · 2026-10-05

If a woman over thirty five has one hour a week to spend on her health, I would spend it on resistance training. Here is the reasoning.

If a woman over thirty five asked me where to spend one hour a week to get the most benefit, I would not say cardio. I would say resistance training.

Here is the full reasoning.

Muscle is where glucose goes

This is the mechanism most people never hear.

When you contract and load a muscle, it draws glucose out of the bloodstream and holds it. It does this through a pathway that does not require insulin at all.

Which means muscle is your body's largest buffer against blood sugar instability. A woman with very little muscle has very little capacity to handle carbohydrate, no matter how carefully she eats.

This is why loss of muscle mass appears on my list of causes for stalled weight, and why it is one of the most commonly missed.

Muscle determines your metabolic rate

Muscle is metabolically active tissue. Fat, comparatively, is not.

Two women at the same weight and the same height can have substantially different metabolic rates, entirely because of the ratio between the two. This is exactly why BMI tells you almost nothing, and why weight alone tells you nothing at all.

Muscle protects your bones

Bone responds to load. Resistance training is one of the few interventions with a genuine effect on bone density, and bone density matters enormously after menopause, when the protective effect of oestrogen is gone.

This is a long term project with a hard deadline. The work you do in your forties determines the position you are in at seventy.

Muscle controls appetite

Women consistently underestimate this one. Muscle responds quickly, and it is a genuine weapon in controlling appetite. Better blood sugar stability, better satiety, less of the constant food noise.

Why this matters more in perimenopause specifically

From the mid thirties, muscle becomes harder to hold. Hormonal changes work against you. At the same time, insulin resistance tends to rise, fat redistributes toward the abdomen, and metabolic rate drops.

Every one of those is improved by building and keeping muscle. It is the single intervention that addresses the largest number of problems at once.

What this looks like practically

Two or three sessions a week. That is enough to change your trajectory.

Actual resistance. Weights, bands, or your own body weight loaded properly. Not a light class you drift through.

Protein at every meal. You cannot build or keep muscle without the raw material. This is why protein and resistance training are always prescribed together.

Progression. The load has to increase over time or the signal stops.

What to stop doing

Stop training on a tired, sleepless body. Setting an alarm for five regardless of how the night went, regardless of your stress, regardless of where you are in your cycle, adds to the load rather than improving your health. Rest and recovery matter more than the forced session.

Stop replacing everything with cardio. Cardio has real cardiovascular benefits. It does not build the tissue that solves the problems above.

Stop undereating alongside it. Underfed and overtrained is the most common and least productive combination there is.

The measurement that matters

Track muscle mass on a body composition analysis every two to three weeks, and watch the trend rather than the individual reading. That number tells me more about how a woman is responding than her weight ever will.

This article is nutrition education, not medical advice.

Tina Chagoury is a licensed clinical dietitian specialising in women's hormonal health and metabolism, and the creator of the Hormone Reset Method™. Learn more and start here.